Last Thursday I had the honor of presenting Teresa Cardona’s novel The Two Sides (Siruela, 2022) at the Elda Casino. We were able to enjoy the inside of the work, with comments on everything from the same author that could be polished; because it is always very difficult to present a detective novel for more than an hour, to attract the attention of the public, to have fun without mentioning the mystery in its pages. Two days before the appointment, I was able to talk to Teresa Cardona on the phone for more than fifty minutes about her life and professional career, and most of all, The Two Sides. When I closed it, I understood why I enjoyed it so much (or even more).
The novel, as it is for its genre, begins with the murder of a 50-year-old man in San Lorenzo del Escorial, and in principle nothing is known about him. The murder has similarities with the legend of Tantalus: he dies with his hands and feet tied, completely without water, and sees a bottle of water out of reach. The setting in the intrigue takes place in the first episode, but it begins with the face of the civilian guard lieutenant Karen Blecker, who was transferred from Europol to Spain and almost always fell in love with Philippe in absentia. Next to him will be brigadier José Luis Cano, counterpoint for plot development as the genre dictates, and as I told the author, he also has a novel. These dualities in the narrative will be constant as we replace the police with the lives of the characters.
The book consists of 59 short chapters with a dual plot that follows each other over time. The first covers the summer of 2016; the second, in 1987, with the background of the GAL. Here, while the reader knows the life of a whole family that will end in tragedy, the most recent plot begins with a murder and continues with its illumination. Both follow each other in the service of facts, so that it is very difficult to stop reading, because the author perfectly controls the thematic progression so that the different nuances of the tension are never spoiled in the absence of any sharpness. Parallel to the police story, all the major events of the novel involve pitting against the duality of disparate themes such as love, politics, terror, torture, revenge, guilt, and justice, which forces the characters to put themselves on the same level. So it’s clear that nothing is the same if you’re the one affected, which is exemplified in the making of certain characters, like the progressive journalist in 1989.
This structure offers memorable episodes both because of their intensity and their brutality towards the reader who usually knows more than the characters, thus providing a very high level of addiction to the story.
For all these reasons, the sensations conveyed by the novel are rich and varied: intrigue, sadness, anguish, admiration, revenge, anger, guilt, and above all a great understanding; In the penultimate episode, I had to check myself in on a letter in the second person singular, because I was returning from a convention in Las Palmas, and with the mix of emotions it produced inside me, it was nothing. that the people around me on the plane thought there was something wrong with me. An unforgettable episode for the restrained, close, brutal and sensitive style. With it, the balance tilts to either side, and the reader (I) accepts this because he understands when full empathy arises.
And why should you read this novel? Since it is an excellent detective work that will satisfy even the most meticulous reader in terms of its subject, structure and characters; and frankly, it transcends the police story and is set in real life that each of us can experience. Teresa Cardona excited me with a crime novel. This can only be due to the emergence of something that can be called art, when it is well written and what is written makes one feel emotional.
Source: Informacion
